The Worst Movies Starring The Best Actors

10 Amazing Actors Who Made The Mistake Of Playing In Dreadful Movies

This article was originally published by AskMen UK — so don't mind the references to things like "pounds," "chaps" and "packets of crisps," whatever those are.

It’s barely the end of February but Zoolander 2 is already being touted as the worst movie of 2016 (if it is, thank god we got it out of the way early). Despite massive cameos and outlandish marketing campaigns, it was a box office bomb.

And let's not forget (even though we already forgot about it) January's Dirty Grandpa. Perhaps its most egregious act is casting Robert De Niro as an old man who acts like a pervy 13-year-old, possibly marking his least funny role yet.

Al Pacino – Jack and Jill

Columbia Pictures

There’s no question that Pacino knows that what he’s doing in this Adam Sandler movie is ridiculous. He is completely in on the gag, but it’s really not a very funny gag, no matter how much he tries to sell it. The film is Sandler playing the usual Sandler plus his own awful twin sister. That’s the joke, that there are two of them and one’s a woman. Well done. Pacino plays a bizarro version of himself and at one point dances through a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial. The man has an Oscar.

Julianne Moore – Seventh Son

Universal Pictures

Every award-magnet actor is allowed a big budget payday, because making critically-adored indie movies won’t cover all the bills. This is Julianne Moore’s and it is horrible. Moore plays a witch in one of those forgettable bits of fantasy nonsense that goes to great pains to explain a dense mythology in an effort to mask an absence of any real story. At least she has Jeff Bridges to share her shame.

Morgan Freeman – Dreamcatcher

Warner Bros.

Thanks to a script by William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) and Lawrence Kasdan (The Empire Strikes Back) there are some fun lines in this Stephen King adaptation but it’s otherwise a big globby mess. Four friends on a hunting trip are attacked by a parasitic alien, kicking off a story that makes barely a lick of sense. Freeman is atrocious as a mad military man with evil eyebrows.

Anthony Hopkins – The Wolfman

Universal Pictures

This remake of the old Hammer Horror favourite didn’t do well by anyone, more likely to draw yawns than screams. The main cast – Hopkins, Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro – is exceptional on paper yet they’re mostly dreary, to match the film. Hopkins skulks in the shadows for most of the film until eventually being given a wolf suit for a comical fight scene. It’s unbefitting of a lord.

Michael Caine – Jaws: The Revenge

The fourth in the Jaws franchise, the quality of which plunged to murky depths after Spielberg’s 1975 classic. As piece-of-crap cinema goes it’s one of the stinkiest, including a shark that bears grudges and somehow knows where to find everyone it wants to eat. It also roars, which will have come as a surprise to the scientific community. At the end the shark dies by explosion, despite not being in the vicinity of any explosives. Michael Caine, as the pilot love interest of beleaguered Ellen Brody, keeps an admirably straight face while delivering lines like, “If I fly any faster, this thing will turn into a flying Cuisinart and we’ll all be diced into oblivion”.

Marlon Brando – The Island of Dr Moreau

New Line Cinema

The stories about the disastrous making of this disaster are far more entertaining than watching the actual film. By the time he agreed to star in this, Brando was well past his glory days and just as far past giving a monkey’s about anything. He plays a mad scientist who has been making animal-human hybrids. Brando’s eccentricities on set are now the stuff of legend. He’d have his lines fed to him by radio receiver, which would occasionally pick up police radio, the content of which he’d repeat as if it were his dialogue. Or he’d insist his character wear a bucket as a hat.

Dustin Hoffman – Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium

Icon Productions

From the same writer as the odd, charming Stranger Than Fiction, this toy store fantasy has the same amount of whimsy but none of the mad brilliance. It’s a gooey, bland story of a 243-year-old toy shop owner (Hoffman) who wants a young woman (Natalie Portman) to take over when he pops off. He takes bloody ages to pop off.

Denzel Washington – Virtuosity

Paramount Pictures

Hollywood was very excited by the internet in the mid-90s, leading to lots of films that treated the online world as a place of magic and danger. Virtuosity imagines a world where there are serial killers in the ‘virtual reality’ world and one of them manages to escape into ‘real reality’. Washington’s cop-slash-prisoner hunts him. It’s completely barking with an understanding of technology that would be embarrassing to your granddad who thinks his VCR is spying on him.

Laurence Olivier – The Jazz Singer

Warner Bros.

Olivier is often cited as one of the best actors who ever lived, perhaps the best. The only major argument against that is his performance in this remake of the 1927 movie about a son of a strict Jewish father who dreams of becoming a singer. It’s a string of offences, the greatest of which is not even Neil Diamond, in the lead, performing in blackface. Olivier plays the old Jewish man like he watched Ron Moody as Fagin in Oliver! and thought he was pitching it a bit too subtle.

Elizabeth Taylor – The Flintstones

Universal Pictures

One of the most famous flops of the 90s, this dreadful live-action take on the prehistoric cartoon managed to assemble a spot-on cast, including John Goodman as Fred Flintstone and Rick Moranis as Barney Rubble. It even roped in Elizabeth Taylor to play Fred’s mother-in-law, presumably by bashing her over the head with a club and dragging her to set.